The congregation as unaccountable consumers

Michael Spencer, in his series about "The Baptist Way," has interviewed Wyman Richardson, author of a book about "biblical church discipline." One of his questions was about that subject:

Your major work has been in the area of church discipline, but many Baptists are deeply opposed to discipline of any kind, including many who are questioning the entire idea of church membership. What does the abandonment of church discipline among Baptists mean for our future as a definable movement of churches?

It is a tragedy. It was John Dagg who said that “when discipline leaves a church, Christ goes with it.” This is something I’ve wrestled with a good bit, and I’ve come to believe that congregational polity without discipline is an absolute recipe for disaster. Ironically, most congregations have maintained discipline of the pastor and staff while recoiling at structures of accountability being placed on themselves, an idea that not only earlier generations of Baptist pastors, but also earlier generations of Baptist laypeople would have found tragic. Yet this accountability of the pastor to the people does not itself arise from biblical concerns, but rather from a nascent corporatism that sees the pastor as an employee and the people as customers. In this and other ways the abandonment of discipline has already begun to cripple Baptist congregational life.

As for our future as a definable movement of churches, our basic infidelity to the witness of Scripture in the area of discipline will logically erode our reflection of the biblical witness in other areas of ecclesiological identity. The inevitable relaxing of doctrinal standards and definition that has come and will come in local churches with the disappearance of church discipline will also bear the bitter fruit of identity erosion. In short, I believe that the abandonment of church discipline is going to finally result in a lowest-common denominator doctrinal stance, an unchecked and rampant consumer mentality in Baptist churches as the congregation continues to see itself as the unaccountable consumer and the ministers as the accountable employees, and the eventual abandonment of other Baptist distinctives.

internetmonk.com: The Baptist Way: Interview with Dr. Wyman Richardson on Baptists, The Lord’s Supper, Church Discipline and Tradition